Ninad Shah
EVP – Chatbots at AmplifyReach

AmplifyReach has recently unvelied their Chat bot which they claimed required no coding expertise to run.  We spoke to Ninad Shah, EVP Chatbots, AmplifyReach, about the future of brands using Ai Chatbots to engage with customers.

MTS: Tell us about your role at AmplifyReach and how you arrived at this position?
Ninad Shah: AmplifyReach is a leading Augmented Intelligence platform with an integrated solution for live chat and AI-powered Chatbot. The solution provides brands the capability to build and deploy a human-like conversational chatbot (no coding required) to provide 24/7 services across Web, Mobile, Social, Messenger, and email.

The AmplifyReach Catalyst platform enables businesses to separate scalability from headcount, and take smarter and informed decisions.

At AmplifyReach, I am the business owner for Chatbot. I oversee Product, Engineering, GTM and Services for Chatbot. Additionally, I oversee chatbot user experience. I have close to two decade’s experience in different roles including 6+ years of entrepreneurial experience with one of my start-up getting acquired. I came to AmplifyReach as I have a deep interest in this space and the unique position AmplifyReach Catalyst Platform is in to provide solutions to brands and service providers. AmplifyReach Catalyst Platform’s core is built ground-up with proprietary natural language processing technology with machine learning and neural networks, to understand, build, and identify context, intent, and interest in English communication.

MTS: How should marketers plan the adoption of Intelligent Chatbots across their omnichannel marketing campaigns?
Ninad: There are two points, the first one is the trend of how customers interact with brands. The second point is that call centers are also moving to chat based communication as the first line of engagement. Millennials, and Gen X customers increasingly prefer to connect with brands through messaging apps or social media.

Most of the customers don’t like having to wait for more than 60 secs for an agent to attend to their queries. Plus, customers like to use their favorite channels to communicate with brands, be it Facebook Messenger or Twitter, or through an app.

Customers prefer to be reached on the channels where they spend the most time and are more comfortable with. Brand marketers need a way to reach out to customers on those channels in a conversational manner, where the customers can interact and get more details instead of just a static content. Unlike anything else, this needs to be driven by sales and support staff than developers, so selecting the right tool for conversational AI is key, where no coding experience should  be required.

MTS: What are the standard compliance measures that all AI-based Chat bots are required to meet and fulfill?
Ninad: AI-based chat bots as any other channel, must fulfill exact same standards that are set for any enterprise grade chat application. Any solutions that a marketer adopts needs to atleast comply, if not better, supporting strong access controls, industry standard encryption, and user data protection. Customer experience with personalization also needs to abide by these security and compliance measures.

MTS: How should marketers scale their personalization and concierge features for first-time customers? Ninad: The AmplifyReach Catalyst Platform simplifies the problem of scale and adopting omnichannel strategy. We automate and manage different business processes and intents. Technology allows an easy-to-consume conversational interface between brands and customers with human-like dialogue and intent switching capability.

With AmplifyReach, brand marketers could launch chatbots to handle various services for internal and external customers like buy, renew, support queries, product discovery, concierge services, drive-focused marketing with loyalty & rewards. Service can be configured to be proactive or on-demand to engage with the customer. Based on the channel, interaction information can be retained to provide better engagement.

AmplifyReach provides rich agent terminal for human support teams to handle complex queries and questions. The platform supports team management capabilities, compliance, and enterprise security expectations. Bot to human agent transfer for complex or specialized services is seamless. Auto-handover or single clicking on “Start Chat” lets the FreshDesk agent connect and communicate with the customer directly. Agent terminal feature also includes deep analytics and reporting, remote assistance by screen share, free agent assignment to optimize performance, historical data archive and so on.

MTS: How should marketers use chatbot platforms to protect from malicious, bad advertisement or content? Please suggest some examples via case studies.
Ninad: Most brands have their own earned media where the customers interact with them on regular basis sharing their experiences of the product/service. It is important for a brand and marketers to interact with these customers.

The AmplifyReach Catalyst Platform can help marketers and brands to provide a conversational interface with customers to address their queries on these channels instantly and flag the live agent  when a handover is required. Chatbots would take over a majority or all the repetitive queries, so that the live agent can address the more complex queries.

Marketers and Brands can deploy a chatbot across channels to engage with positive interactions and address negative interactions for better brand perception.

One additional offshoot of our Natural Language Understanding (NLU) technology is used by global DSPs and Ad networks is around IAB’s contextual categorization and brand safety to decide if this web page is appropriate for a brand in real-time.

MTS: What is the correlation between bot traffic and ad fraud metrics? How should marketers plan their budget for AI-based chat bots to resolve the issues with false reporting?
Ninad: Ad Fraud is a serious problem for the AdTech industry. The IAB estimated that $4.2 billion was lost due to “non-human traffic”.

When it comes to owned media, AI-based chat bot marketers need to have a control on what, how and who their bot engages. The AmplifyReach Catalyst Platform provides complete transparent controls to marketers including blocking such violators. Moreover, the more an AI powered chatbot engages with customers, the smarter it gets. This results in an increase in query resolution.

On earned media channel, this massive and scaled operation to cover pages to ecommerce portals, allows brands to identify malicious behaviour and take appropriate action by engaging with web property owner.

MTS: Thanks for chatting with us, Ninad.
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